During the critical twenty years before the Civil War, evangelical Protestants greatly influenced the style and substance of American political life. In this book Richard Carwardine reveals how the evangelicals helped to shape political culture, party development, and sectional antagonism in an age of emerging mass democracy.

Using voluminous public and private sources, Carwardine lays out evangelicalism's complex character between 1840 and 1861. He describes how the evangelical clergy played an increasingly public political role as issues with clear religious and moral implications came to dominate political life. Carwardine explains how both northern and southern evangelicals encouraged voting and responsible citizenship, pressured politicians, and ensured that questions of education, Indian removal, war, drink, and slavery were placed firmly on the political agenda. He argues that the frustration of the evangelicals at the failure of Whigs and Democrats to stand up for evangelical values was instrumental in the dissolution of the "second party system," and that the new Republican party was widely viewed by northern evangelicals as "the Christian party in politics." However, both southern and northern evangelicals believed in the morality of their position, and the intensity of their respective beliefs reinforced the drive toward adversarial politics. Carwardine contends that religion furnished the vocabulary, the platform, and the speakers for political debate, functioning as the lightning rod by which politics was shaped and illuminated in antebellum society.